


the type who doesn't burn

by patrocluus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Resurrection, Temporary Character Death, questionable parenting choices (murder)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28902777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrocluus/pseuds/patrocluus
Summary: On a late October afternoon in 1997, John Winchester takes his son out into the woods and puts a bullet between his eyes.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 74





	the type who doesn't burn

i.

On a late October afternoon in 1997, John Winchester takes his son out into the woods and puts a bullet between his eyes.

ii.

Sam has been difficult of late, more so than usual. He is becoming a teenager in the most traditional sense of the word: moody, cold, an overwhelming presence in the cramped space of their rented cabin. Dean was never like this, never felt the need to assert himself against John’s every order, take a stand on every issue under the sun before John has even realised it’s going to be an issue. He hadn’t realised just how easy he’d had it back then, with a boy who took to discipline without having to drill it in, who would follow orders without having to repeat them twice, thrice.

(It’s not just that Sam has been difficult, per se; it’s that every time John looks at him, he’s struck by a slightly more distinct sliver of doubt, the thought that keeps worming its way into his head that there is something just on the wrong side of not-quite-right about his son. Bobby tells him that he needs to screw his head on straight and quit dragging his kids into whatever he’s going through right now. The books he pours over at night, old ones that smell faintly of sulphur and whose pages are lined with red-ink sigils, tell him that there is plenty that can be wrong with a child if you know where to look. He tries not to look; he scrutinises his son’s every movement anyway. There’s nothing there, undoubtedly, but he can’t quite convince himself of that.

He takes Sam on the hunt with him more to prove a point than anything; it’s a lone vamp that he could have taken out one hand behind his back if he wanted to. But it will do Sam, sullen and furious about the fact that they’ll be leaving town this Friday two days before his soccer match, some good to swing a machete at some vamp. Get his adrenaline pumping a little; clear his head. If there’s a part of John that is worried to let him out of his sight for too long (and it’s not just concern for  _ Sam _ ’s safety, either) — well, he doesn’t have to examine that too closely.

But he’s miscalculated, the vamp is stronger and further gone than he anticipated, and Sammy went down hard and bloody in the other room, and the vamp is on top of him, fangs bared, and John’s vision is white, his heart and head pounding, knife firmly out of reach across the floor, and—

The vamp flies away from him, literally, slamming against the back wall of the cabin with an ugly crunch and the  _ slice _ of a knife going through its throat where it lands. A thud; its head topples to the ground.

John looks up, panting, to where his youngest son stands in the doorway, holding himself up against the frame. His eyes are wild, panicked, and there’s a sheen over them that John can’t quite place. He has not moved towards the vampire, whose body thuds as it hits the floor, as though in slow motion. A trickle of blood runs down Sam’s nose, across his chin.

John stares at him, and Sam stares back.

A single thought:  _ there is something evil in my son. _

iii.

“I pushed it across the room,” Sam says quietly, in the car ride back, a wad of gauze pressed to the oozing cut in his side where the vamp had thrown him, before. Lie.

“The knife was already there,” he says. Lie.

“I don’t know why the vamp flew like that, Dad, I swear.” Lie.

“I swear, Dad.” His voice is pitching higher, caught in his throat. “Dad?”

John does not take his eyes off the road ahead of them, hands clenched tightly around the steering wheel. He does not look at the boy sitting beside him, the boy who just threw a creature across the room like it was nothing; the boy who flinched almost imperceptibly at drops of holy water hitting his skin last week; the boy whose demon kindergarten teacher once told John in the moment before Dean exorcised her, in a lilting, blissful voice, that Sammy was special, that he was going to be the answer to everything. 

“I know, Sammy,” he says. “I believe you.”

When they get back to the cabin, Sam excuses himself to his room the second they set foot inside, and John lets him, with barely a hint of acknowledgment. After all, he has research to do.

iv.

_ Entry date: October 19 _

_ Fuck. Alright. So what are the options? _

_ a) ~~Sammy’s been possessed.~~ _ _ No response to salt, to a “Christo”, and that response to holy water was not enough to be actually demonic, not all the way. The books all say that those are the telltale possession signs. Bobby said the same thing. It’s just him in there.  _

_ b) ~~That wasn’t Sammy~~ _ _~~.~~ Could it have been a shapeshifter, some other kind of monster altogether? Of course it wasn’t. I saw his eyes, after, the expression with which he stared at me. I heard his goddamn blabbering on the way back. I’ve known the kid for fifteen years now. That was all him. _

_ c) Sam is a monster. _

(And you know that there’s only one way to deal with monsters.)

v.

“Come on, we’re going out for target practice,” John tells Sam, and the kid, on edge and jumpy since the hunt that they have not exchanged a word about since, almost flinches, a slight twitch in his shoulders. John clocks it, doesn’t say anything.

“Yes, sir,” Sam says, all but jumping to attention from where he was sitting on the bed with his knees drawn up to his chest, and he’s up in a second, scrambling for his boots under the bed. God, but what John would have given for this kind of easy obedience a week ago. He turns his back on the boy, leaves the door open as he steps outside.

The air is crisp, chillier than one would expect from October — it’s going to be a harsh winter this year, most likely. Sam shivers, dressed too lightly in his shirt and flannel, an old one of his brother’s that Dean grew out of long ago. They are largely silent, but John offers a question or two about school, the soccer team, things that Sam latches onto instantly like a lifeline. Sunlight filters through the trees golden and bright as they make their way deeper into the forest. Target practice takes place where no one else might be around to hear the shots ring out. The forest is coated thickly in silence, but for the crunching of leaves under their boots; not even bird calls break through the quiet.

When they’re far enough in that John reckons they won’t be heard by a living soul, he puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder, bringing him to a halt. Sam stops, looks around, then meets his father’s eyes. There is a question in his gaze, his mouth already opening to form the words:  _ why are we stopping here? _ But realisation is already dawning in his eyes, and they are a few miles away from the nearest road, and John is already taking a step back, hand on the pistol shoved into the back of his jeans. A 9mm: simple, clean. 

He brings it out, weighs it in his hand.

“Dad,” Sam says, finding his voice, high-pitched and desperate. His eyes are wide, still not entirely comprehending. “Dad, wait, hold on, what’s going on —”

“I’m sorry, son,” John says, and he means it, he does, even as he lifts the gun up to point perfectly between his son’s eyes. Point-blank. Deep breath. “But I think you know that I wouldn’t do this if I had any other choice. Right, Sam?”

He doesn’t give Sam a chance to answer.

vi.

A couple hundred meters away, a crow takes off in a flurry of wings at the shot that rings through the forest.

John trudges through the woods, gun stuffed back into the waistband of his jeans, and thinks about what story he can possibly tell his oldest son.

vii.

Later, when John has long since made it back to the motel and is waiting for Dean to come back from his party with a grim kind of apprehension, there is a voice in the woods, everywhere and nowhere. It says, amused, “Oh, that won’t do, will it?” and under the dark cover of the trees, Sam sits up with a deep, rasping gasp.

He lifts a hand up to feel the skin of his face, his forehead: unmarked, unblemished, no hint of a wound. His hand comes away, though, with bits of crusted brown blood clinging to it. There was a wound, and now there is none. 

He thinks:  _ my father tried to kill me. _

He thinks:  _ my father did kill me, and it didn’t take. _

He bends over and vomits onto the muddy ground of the forest floor. 

After all, this means — what, exactly? That his father was right. His father was right to be afraid of him, to recognise that there was something inside of him that needed killing; it’s just that neither of them really realised the scope of that thing. The full extent of Sam’s inhumanity, that which has left him here, alone on the forest floor in the dark, shivering and alive and coated in the blood of an injury that his father put there but which didn’t quite stick.

The blood has seeped through his shirt, staining it a dried brown that stands out starkly against the light fabric. Sam shrugs out of the flannel, fighting the material as it clings to his skin, stuck there by a sticky layer of not-quite-dry blood and sweat and dampness of the earth. Once the shirt is off, he hurls it away from himself.  _ Got to get rid of the evidence. _ The shirt he’s wearing underneath is black, more forgiving of stains in the scarce light. 

With a handful of leaves he picks up off the forest floor — it’s the time of year when the trees are becoming skeletal with the shedding of their foliage, and the ground is littered with brown leaves — Sam scrubs at his arms, his face, his neck. He has to get rid of the blood, blood that is  _ everywhere _ . It comes away flaky, like little snowstorms that look black in the darkness as they drift downwards. He scrubs until his skin is raw, and then some.

He’s starting to shiver, but he can’t bring himself to put the shirt he just tossed away back on, not with the bloodstains darkening its front. Instead, he gets unsteadily to his feet, picks a direction that feels about right — it’s a lot harder to tell North from South in the dark when all directions look the same and the stars are barely visible through the trees’ branches snaking together overhead — and starts walking.

viii.

One foot in front of the other. Again. And again.

Had he realised, somehow, deep down? Realised the full truth of his monsterhood, thrown in his face now in stark black-and-white terms as he sat there for just a moment on the forest floor, whole and new and completely, inhumanly untouched? Of course he must have had some idea, even if he was too cowardly to admit it to himself. Of course he’s felt it coursing through his veins, the truth of it:  _ monstrous, monstrous, monstrous _ .

His dad, clearly, was not too stupid to recognise that evil, nor too weak to act on it. His dad  _ shot him _ , right in the head, like a rabid dog in the woods. His dad looked at him and passed judgment, and Sam woke up again anyway. Confirmation of every suspicion John might have had, every conviction of what Sam was.  _ Quod erat demonstrandum. _

One more step, and another. The night is eerily quiet around him.

God, he has no idea what he’s going to say to his father.

ix.

Dark has settled around the cabin like a heavy blanket, and Dean is deep into his third beer, when the door handle turns, and his little brother stands in the doorway.

“Heya, Sammy,” he says, with a quick glance up, “where the hell you been?” because his father offered nothing more than something vague about meeting up with a classmate, which shouldn’t usually have kept his brother out until this late. Then he looks up properly, and there is something in Sam’s eyes, an expression that Dean does not recognise at all, as he meets John’s stare. 

He doesn’t even look at Dean as he says, so quiet that it’s almost a whisper, “Just out.”

“Just out? What does that mean?” His brother’s still not looking at him. “Sammy, what’s going on?”

John is staring right back at Sam, and something passes between them, something unspoken but so very important; both of their expressions are inscrutable in a way that they shouldn’t be, not after Dean’s spent the past fifteen years learning to read every micro-expression, every aborted gesture his family lets slip. 

(He will not come to understand the dawning horror and understanding that passes between his father and his brother in this moment, not for years and years.)

“Guys?” He hates how his voice slips into uncertainty on that word; he wants to demand answers, wants to do anything to wipe the pale, ghost-shocked misery off Sam’s face, out of the set of his shoulders, shivering minutely.

But Sam cuts him off, says, without ever looking away from John: “I’m going to bed.”

And John nods, eyes tracking Sam as he springs back into motion and almost-sprints across the room towards the bedroom he and Dean share. He leaves muddy footprints all across the floor. He closes the door not with a slam, but very, very carefully.

  
  


x.

There is a truce between them, and it is uncomfortable and fragile, the fracture lines visible all over, but its terms are firm if unspoken: we do not talk about this, we do not repeat it, and Dean does not need to know.

Sam feels this terrifying, unflinching knowledge of his otherness sitting in his chest as he pours his cereal in the morning, as they drive away from this town (two days before his team’s soccer match, exactly as planned), as he sits in the back seat of the car with his head against the rumbling window. As he hunches over big dusty books at night by the bedside lamp, pours over well-buried lore websites on his laptop, beneath the covers while Dean gently snores across the room. There must be answers — there  _ have _ to be — but he can’t find them. Can’t get beyond the baseline of the evil that must be inside him; can’t get at the full scope of it.

And if John hesitates for a moment too long, a month or so later, standing over Sam’s body bleeding out on the floor of some abandoned cabin a few miles outside of Ogden, Illinois (a werewolf hunt gone wrong, and Sam hadn’t said a word the entire way there, just nodded at the right times and loaded and reloaded his gun on and on, like a compulsion, and now he’s bleeding out from his side and Dean is yelling at Dad to get the first aid kit, he needs stitches and fast, Dad,  _ come on — _ )

— well, Sam can hardly fault him for his moment of uncertainty. He thinks it must flash through both of their minds, in those heartbeats before Dean’s voice rises in panic and their father springs into motion:  _ maybe this time it could stick. _

  
  


xi.

Years later, Dean says, “He just said that I had to save you, that nothing else mattered. And that if I couldn't, I'd —“

And Sam nods, finishes, matter-of-fact: “You’d have to kill me.”

A pause. Dean, uncertain: “Sammy?”

Sam breathes in slowly, lets it out. Measured. This has been, after all, a long time coming. Just like John, really, to leave it to his son to clean up his messes.

“Okay,” he says, unfolds his arms to let them hang by his side. He meets his brother’s bewildered gaze, watches the slowly dawning realisation unfold, and swallows. “Let’s do this, then.”


End file.
